Are you aware of this? It's outragious

[daveman]

We are also assured that private busineses will regulate themselves.

The same people who assured me that government-run healthcare will save money also assure me that unless the government keeps a microscope on every facet of every industry, businesses will pollute the air and water until all their customers are dead in order to maximize profits.

intricacies.... bazaar unmapped labyrinths meant to ultimately weed out the wheat from the tares... eh, and then to serve higher unmentionable purposes...

31 Days...

Over the past month, the American people have been focused on jobs (9.2% unemployment), the economy (1.3% GDP), and debt ($14.3 trillion). Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has quietly moved forward regulations that are making it harder for the private sector to create new jobs.
In July alone:
Proposed Rules: 229
Final Rules: 379
Economically Significant Rules: 10
Regulatory Costs: Over $9.5 billion

The President’s regulatory agencies kept rolling out more job crushing red tape:
EPA: Transport Rule $2.4 billion
Obamacare: Exchanges Rule $424 million
Dodd-Frank: Consumer Financial Protection Board Full Powers

And delaying rules instead of canceling them:
Boiler MACT: Stayed Indefinitely
Utility MACT: Delayed Two Months
Ozone: Delayed Temporarily
Derivatives Rules: Delayed Six Months
Obamacare: Nearly 1,500 Waivers​

More big government. Pretty soon, we'll all be criminals because we can't help but break rules we don't even know about.

 

[daveman]

Wanna save nearly a trillion bucks over the next 10 years? Here ya go. Why we aren't working on ways to reduce this is beyond me.


Entitlement Bandits - Michael F. Cannon - National Review Online

" Consider some of the fraud schemes discovered in recent years. In Brooklyn, a dentist billed taxpayers for nearly 1,000 procedures in a single day. A Houston doctor with a criminal record took her Medicare billings from zero to $11.6 million in one year; federal agents shut down her clinic but did not charge her with a crime. A high-school dropout, armed with only a laptop computer, submitted more than 140,000 bogus Medicare claims, collecting $105 million. A health plan settled a Medicaid-fraud case in Florida for $138 million. The giant hospital chain Columbia/HCA paid $1.7 billion in fines and pled guilty to more than a dozen felonies related to bribing doctors to help it tap Medicare funds and exaggerating the amount of care delivered to Medicare patients. In New York, Medicaid spending on the human-growth hormone Serostim leapt from $7 million to $50 million in 2001; but it turned out that drug traffickers were getting the drug prescribed as a treatment for AIDS wasting syndrome, then selling it to bodybuilders. And a study of ten states uncovered $27 million in Medicare payments to dead patients.
These anecdotes barely scratch the surface. Judging by official estimates, Medicare and Medicaid lose at least $87 billion per year to fraudulent and otherwise improper payments, and about 10.5 percent of Medicare spending and 8.4 percent of Medicaid spending was improper in 2009. Fraud experts say the official numbers are too low. “Loss rates due to fraud and abuse could be 10 percent, or 20 percent, or even 30 percent in some segments,” explained Malcolm Sparrow, a mathematician, Harvard professor, and former police inspector, in congressional testimony. “The overpayment-rate studies the government has relied on . . . have been sadly lacking in rigor, and have therefore produced comfortingly low and quite misleading estimates.” In 2005, the New York Times reported that “James Mehmet, who retired in 2001 as chief state investigator of Medicaid fraud and abuse in New York City, said he and his colleagues believed that at least 10 percent of state Medicaid dollars were spent on fraudulent claims, while 20 or 30 percent more were siphoned off by what they termed abuse, meaning unnecessary spending that might not be criminal.” And even these experts ignore other, perfectly legal ways of exploiting Medicare and Medicaid, such as when a senior hides and otherwise adjusts his finances so as to appear eligible for Medicaid, or when a state abuses the fact that the federal government matches state Medicaid outlays. "

They don't have this problem in China. The punishment for defrauding the government is death. It's simple and effective.

sounds good to me.

Fascists.

 

[Greenbeard]

Private companies spend money weeding out fraud before it happens. Thus their overhead is higher. Medicare allows fraud and then attempts to go after it.

You think the overhead is lower for pay and chase than deterrence?

You have some proof to the contrary?

You made the claim that "Private companies spend money weeding out fraud before it happens. Thus their overhead is higher." This strikes me as being far from clear, given the expenses of the chase. So what is your justification?

This is standard procedure between "wellness centers" (hospitals etc) and the insurance companies. Prices vary widely and they routinely try to gouge insurance companies, who then negotiate them down to a price both agree on as if they were 2 hagglers at some flea market. Revolting and absurd are far too kind to describe it. There are not even set prices for procedures, never mind the fraud of doing ones that aren't needed or the extreme cases of billing for things never provided.

All-payer rate setting (currently practiced only in Maryland, for their hospitals) prevents providers from charging payers different amounts for the same service. It has worked pretty well for Maryland.

 

[The Rabbi]

You think the overhead is lower for pay and chase than deterrence?

You have some proof to the contrary?

You made the claim that "Private companies spend money weeding out fraud before it happens. Thus their overhead is higher." This strikes me as being far from clear, given the expenses of the chase. So what is your justification?

This is standard procedure between "wellness centers" (hospitals etc) and the insurance companies. Prices vary widely and they routinely try to gouge insurance companies, who then negotiate them down to a price both agree on as if they were 2 hagglers at some flea market. Revolting and absurd are far too kind to describe it. There are not even set prices for procedures, never mind the fraud of doing ones that aren't needed or the extreme cases of billing for things never provided.

All-payer rate setting (currently practiced only in Maryland, for their hospitals) prevents providers from charging payers different amounts for the same service. It has worked pretty well for Maryland.

OK. So you have no proof.
I doubt private insurance companies are spending anywhere close to what Medicare pays out in fraudulent claims every year.
But hey, find something credible and we can talk.

 

[Greenbeard]

OK. So you have no proof.

I don't have proof of your claim, no. Customarily that burden would fall to you.

 

[Trajan]

We are also assured that private busineses will regulate themselves.

really? who said that?

 

[Trajan]

You have some proof to the contrary?

You made the claim that "Private companies spend money weeding out fraud before it happens. Thus their overhead is higher." This strikes me as being far from clear, given the expenses of the chase. So what is your justification?

This is standard procedure between "wellness centers" (hospitals etc) and the insurance companies. Prices vary widely and they routinely try to gouge insurance companies, who then negotiate them down to a price both agree on as if they were 2 hagglers at some flea market. Revolting and absurd are far too kind to describe it. There are not even set prices for procedures, never mind the fraud of doing ones that aren't needed or the extreme cases of billing for things never provided.

All-payer rate setting (currently practiced only in Maryland, for their hospitals) prevents providers from charging payers different amounts for the same service. It has worked pretty well for Maryland.

OK. So you have no proof.
I doubt private insurance companies are spending anywhere close to what Medicare pays out in fraudulent claims every year.
But hey, find something credible and we can talk.

I have had this argument with greenbeard, it was a while ago but I think if anyone looked you'd find that prvt. entities spend a great deal more on fraud etc. then gov. entities. he knows this too.

further gov. always trots out that old canard, these efficiency banners like we have just been sitting here all these decades waiting for Lucky the Unicorn who will now magically make billions appear in fraud correction and efficiency but, it never seems to happen.....

 

[The Rabbi]

You made the claim that "Private companies spend money weeding out fraud before it happens. Thus their overhead is higher." This strikes me as being far from clear, given the expenses of the chase. So what is your justification?



All-payer rate setting (currently practiced only in Maryland, for their hospitals) prevents providers from charging payers different amounts for the same service. It has worked pretty well for Maryland.

OK. So you have no proof.
I doubt private insurance companies are spending anywhere close to what Medicare pays out in fraudulent claims every year.
But hey, find something credible and we can talk.

I have had this argument with greenbeard, it was a while ago but I think if anyone looked you'd find that prvt. entities spend a great deal more on fraud etc. then gov. entities. he knows this too.

further gov. always trots out that old canard, these efficiency banners like we have just been sitting here all these decades waiting for Lucky the Unicorn who will now magically make billions appear in fraud correction and efficiency but, it never seems to happen.....

I assume you mean fraud prevention, resulting in lower levels of fraud.
Greenbeard is such a dishonest twit it would not surprise me that he has been through this before and learned nothing.

 

[The Rabbi]

OK. So you have no proof.

I don't have proof of your claim, no. Customarily that burden would fall to you.

Actually it would fall on you to disprove the proposition. If it were false, you'd have no problem finding evidence to that effect. The fact that you can't and are deflecting tells me you are simply dishonest. Again.

Remind me what the new program the GOP proposed to replace Medicare was called.

 

[Greenbeard]

Actually it would fall on you to disprove the proposition.

No, it wouldn't. That's not how things work in grown-up world.

I realize that within the confines of this forum (and perhaps in the real world, as well, I don't know) "spout unsupported bullshit and see if anyone calls me on it" is your preferred modus operandi but don't mistake that for how actual discourse works. Assertions require a modicum of evidence.

 

[The Rabbi]

Actually it would fall on you to disprove the proposition.

No, it wouldn't. That's not how things work in grown-up world.

I realize that within the confines of this forum (and perhaps in the real world, as well, I don't know) "spout unsupported bullshit and see if anyone calls me on it" is your preferred modus operandi but don't mistake that for how actual discourse works. Assertions require a modicum of evidence.

It's certainly easier than finding something to prove me wrong. If it is so obvious, it shouldn't take you 3 minutes to post a factual refutation. Instead you dither and accuse.
You have no case. You cannot disprove what I wrote.
Any more posts from you without citations will simply add to the proof that you are a dissembler and crank.

 

[bill5]

Actually it would fall on you to disprove the proposition. If it were false, you'd have no problem finding evidence to that effect. The fact that you can't and are deflecting tells me you are simply dishonest. Again.

Not meaning to takes sides but you cannot prove a negative. The burden of proof is on the claimant.

If I may suggest, can each of you state your claim in a clear, simple sentence or two outside of responding to each other and then back it up one way or the other? It appears one is saying that spending money up front to prevent fraud is more costly than spending money to track it down and "police" it later, while the other is saying the opposite. If I'm misunderstanding, all the more reason to (re)state your basic premise ie to un-confuse me.

Personally I'm reasonably certain that it makes more sense to spend money to prevent it up front, generally speaking. This is why private companies spend considerable efforts to do so, ie it is more cost-effective and/or prudent risk-wise in the long run.

 

[The Rabbi]

Actually it would fall on you to disprove the proposition. If it were false, you'd have no problem finding evidence to that effect. The fact that you can't and are deflecting tells me you are simply dishonest. Again.

Not meaning to takes sides but you cannot prove a negative. The burden of proof is on the claimant.

If I may suggest, can each of you state your claim in a clear, simple sentence or two outside of responding to each other and then back it up one way or the other? It appears one is saying that spending money up front to prevent fraud is more costly than spending money to track it down and "police" it later, while the other is saying the opposite. If I'm misunderstanding, all the more reason to (re)state your basic premise ie to un-confuse me.

Personally I'm reasonably certain that it makes more sense to spend money to prevent it up front, generally speaking. This is why private companies spend considerable efforts to do so, ie it is more cost-effective and/or prudent risk-wise in the long run.

The typical claim is the Medicare is more efficient than private insurers because their overhead is lower. I point out their overhead is lower because they are not weeding out fraudulent claims at the outset. If you added the amount of fraud, Medicare's "efficiency" vanishes.
Greenbeard for some reason wants to dispute this, without offering any facts or counter-arguments. If what I write is so wrong, it should be easy to find a study or article that dispels what I write. But he hasn't. Because he can't. Because I am correct.

 

[bill5]

Agreed. And having worked for the gov't for many years, I can tell you that claiming a govt agency is more efficient than comparable private sector is frankly laughable.

 

[The Rabbi]

Agreed. And having worked for the gov't for many years, I can tell you that claiming a govt agency is more efficient than comparable private sector is frankly laughable.

Thanks.
Yeah, it is a measure of either the ignorance or desperation by the Left that they can even propose this with a straight face.

 

[Iridescence]

The same people who assured me that government-run healthcare will save money also assure me that unless the government keeps a microscope on every facet of every industry, businesses will pollute the air and water until all their customers are dead in order to maximize profits.

intricacies.... bazaar unmapped labyrinths meant to ultimately weed out the wheat from the tares... eh, and then to serve higher unmentionable purposes...

31 Days...

Over the past month, the American people have been focused on jobs (9.2% unemployment), the economy (1.3% GDP), and debt ($14.3 trillion). Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has quietly moved forward regulations that are making it harder for the private sector to create new jobs.
In July alone:
Proposed Rules: 229
Final Rules: 379
Economically Significant Rules: 10
Regulatory Costs: Over $9.5 billion

The President’s regulatory agencies kept rolling out more job crushing red tape:
EPA: Transport Rule $2.4 billion
Obamacare: Exchanges Rule $424 million
Dodd-Frank: Consumer Financial Protection Board Full Powers

And delaying rules instead of canceling them:
Boiler MACT: Stayed Indefinitely
Utility MACT: Delayed Two Months
Ozone: Delayed Temporarily
Derivatives Rules: Delayed Six Months
Obamacare: Nearly 1,500 Waivers​

More big government. Pretty soon, we'll all be criminals because we can't help but break rules we don't even know about.

I hear this.... loud and clear and I do understand, but there is so much more. There is a great lacking in many circles that just does to not have to be and it is sadly because of rejection done by those very circles of things that are freely given. Perhaps for sanity's sake they don't accept.... yet science has proven insanity be quite different than commonly understood. I am sorry for the idiocies we represent and I am not backing down. But I am only one person and there are too many things I personally have no clue toward understanding. I need the diversity our nation offers as is and then some. (Hence, my supposed defense of Muslim religious rites.) There is a great many things we as a whole have to come to terms with even disregarding our own personal comforts.

 

[Old Rocks]

Wanna save nearly a trillion bucks over the next 10 years? Here ya go. Why we aren't working on ways to reduce this is beyond me.


Entitlement Bandits - Michael F. Cannon - National Review Online

" Consider some of the fraud schemes discovered in recent years. In Brooklyn, a dentist billed taxpayers for nearly 1,000 procedures in a single day. A Houston doctor with a criminal record took her Medicare billings from zero to $11.6 million in one year; federal agents shut down her clinic but did not charge her with a crime. A high-school dropout, armed with only a laptop computer, submitted more than 140,000 bogus Medicare claims, collecting $105 million. A health plan settled a Medicaid-fraud case in Florida for $138 million. The giant hospital chain Columbia/HCA paid $1.7 billion in fines and pled guilty to more than a dozen felonies related to bribing doctors to help it tap Medicare funds and exaggerating the amount of care delivered to Medicare patients. In New York, Medicaid spending on the human-growth hormone Serostim leapt from $7 million to $50 million in 2001; but it turned out that drug traffickers were getting the drug prescribed as a treatment for AIDS wasting syndrome, then selling it to bodybuilders. And a study of ten states uncovered $27 million in Medicare payments to dead patients.
These anecdotes barely scratch the surface. Judging by official estimates, Medicare and Medicaid lose at least $87 billion per year to fraudulent and otherwise improper payments, and about 10.5 percent of Medicare spending and 8.4 percent of Medicaid spending was improper in 2009. Fraud experts say the official numbers are too low. “Loss rates due to fraud and abuse could be 10 percent, or 20 percent, or even 30 percent in some segments,” explained Malcolm Sparrow, a mathematician, Harvard professor, and former police inspector, in congressional testimony. “The overpayment-rate studies the government has relied on . . . have been sadly lacking in rigor, and have therefore produced comfortingly low and quite misleading estimates.” In 2005, the New York Times reported that “James Mehmet, who retired in 2001 as chief state investigator of Medicaid fraud and abuse in New York City, said he and his colleagues believed that at least 10 percent of state Medicaid dollars were spent on fraudulent claims, while 20 or 30 percent more were siphoned off by what they termed abuse, meaning unnecessary spending that might not be criminal.” And even these experts ignore other, perfectly legal ways of exploiting Medicare and Medicaid, such as when a senior hides and otherwise adjusts his finances so as to appear eligible for Medicaid, or when a state abuses the fact that the federal government matches state Medicaid outlays. "

Hell, if you can rack up the fraud you do to MediCare to nearly two billion dollars, you can be elected governor of Florida!